Senior / Staff Backend Engineer, Platform & Search

About the role

Argon New York City In person Argon builds AI software for life-sciences teams doing complex research, analysis, and writing. Our products connect documents, scientific evidence, and company knowledge to help people produce useful, well-supported work. We’re hiring an experienced backend engineer to own the platform and search systems behind those products. You’ll work directly with the founders and a small engineering team, make consequential technical decisions, and carry projects from an ambiguous problem through implementation, rollout, and production operation.

Responsibilities

• Construct a model of pharma.
• Make relevant evidence accessible through bespoke ontologies, indexing, filtering, and lexical and semantic search.
• Measure quality alongside latency and cost.
• Deliver backend systems end to end.
• Translate product and infrastructure needs into practical plans, write production code, and follow through until it works for customers.
• Break large projects into useful releases.
• Own infrastructure and reliability.
• Build and operate services on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Improve deployment tooling, observability, recovery, capacity management, and tenant isolation.
• Build our next search platform.
• Lead the search database evaluation and migration, including indexing, synchronization, query APIs, backfills, rollout, and rollback.
• Make asynchronous workloads dependable.
• Build systems that handle retries, duplicate work, rate limits, and partial failure.
• Extend the platform to support longer-running AI workflows.
• Help the team ship faster.
• Improve service boundaries, shared libraries, tests, error handling, and development tools where they solve concrete problems.

Requirements

• A track record of personally delivering substantial search, backend, or infrastructure projects into production. You can explain what you built, how you shipped it, what failed, and what improved.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and comfort moving between application code, database queries, and infrastructure.
• Experience operating stateful or distributed services, including queues, concurrency, migrations, and recovery.
• Production experience with search, indexing, or retrieval systems, including the effects of freshness, filters, and permissions on results.
• Practical judgment: you scope work, choose a useful first version, communicate risks early, and finish the rollout.
• Clear communication and thoughtful collaboration with engineers, product partners, and domain experts.
• Our backend stack includes TypeScript/Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Kubernetes. Experience with comparable systems transfers.
• Hybrid search, relevance evaluation, private customer deployments, and AI workflow infrastructure are useful additional experience.
• You’ll have direct ownership of important systems, work closely with the founders, and see the customer impact of your decisions.
• We work together in NYC and support relocation.